TV Priest are a quartet that emerged this year with a couplet of furious singles, “House of York” and “Runner Up”, and today they reveal their biggest body of work yet with an album called Uppers due for release in November. The news comes with the sharing of a new song called “This Island”, with the band saying:
“‘This Island’ is about incoherence and inarticulate responses, both personal and political, in a time and place you don’t fully understand anymore. It’s an unrequited love letter, and a howl of frustration; a mea culpa and a call to arms. We wrote this to an increasingly nationalistic and isolationist drum beat playing out at home and abroad, and frankly we are scared and appalled.
As artists we aren’t offering up solutions for living, but maybe we can extend a hand and let someone know that you aren’t alone in feeling under prepared in your responses yet powerful in your convictions. That small boats can still make big waves. That we have a world to win.”
It would be easy to assume that “This Island” was written in response to the last few months of nonsense from the UK government, but in fact this song was written in response to the several months of nonsense that preceded that – and it’s only grown more pointed in the meantime. TV Priest’s dead-ahead post-punk is fully intact, incorporating some whirring electronics to help with its heavy glide. Charlie Drinkwater rides this wave with equal parts numbness and fury, on the one hand driven to the point of nihilism by the current state of the world, while the better part of him fights back and vocally makes his anger known. It’s a potent concoction that many of us have been feeling in recent months, and to hear it reproduced in visceral sonic form is massively galvanising.
TV Priest’s debut album Uppers is coming out on November 13 through Hand in Hive. You can find the band on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
